Home › Best prompts › #3

Prompt #3It's easy, just do it with Claude

“It's easy, just do it with Claude. Yes, even with eight years of technical debt.”

1,432,118 uses · Corporate · Tech debt

What Claude replies (roughly)

// Initial estimate: 2 days
// Technical debt detected: 8 years, 214 TODOs, 1 COBOL module
// Revised estimate: 2 days (confidence: high)
// Claude replied: “Happy to help!” then: “Could you clarify?”

Observed consequences

• The estimate stays at 2 days, the debt stays at 8 years.
• The COBOL module is “rephrased” into TypeScript and nobody knows what it did.
• The next sprint is spent fixing the fixes.

Verdict

Easy on paper. The debt never read the paper.

Recommendation: Generating code doesn't erase debt: interest keeps accruing (coupling, missing tests, lost knowledge). Estimate from the real code, measure the debt, plan its repayment and don't let a speed gain on one task hide the cost of the whole.

Other popular prompts

• Adapt all of this to the target architecture
• Add the whole stack, it's easy with Claude
• Claude on max effort, and we tell the CEO it's complicated

Inspect my repo →